Geeks usu­ally have, in their DIY bags, many usb-to-serial con­vert­ers such as Arduino’s or Open­picus’. These con­vert­ers, for the peo­ple not accus­tomed to micro­con­trollers’ world, are cir­cuits nor­mally used for upload­ing com­piled code from the PC. Addi­tion­ally, they are used to seri­ally com­mu­ni­cate with the PC. They take usb sig­nal and con­vert it to ser­ial TTL.

Even though ser­ial TTL is very impor­tant when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with micro­con­trollers, many home and indus­trial devices exchange data using RS485 pro­to­col. The main ben­e­fits of using RS485 are basi­cally effi­ciency, econ­omy, the long dis­tances allowed between devices (up to 1200 meters) in elec­tri­cally noisy envi­ron­ments. Con­tinue read­ing →